This physicist has built a supercomputer from old PlayStations

12/31/2014

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Well next time if you start thinking about upgrading your
gaming console for the up-to-date model or for a better one, there may be a fantastic
opportunity than just throwing the old gaming console away, you can use the old
gaming console for science instead. Guarav Khanna, a black hole physicist
currently at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth in the United States,
has succeeded to construct a powerful and tremendously cheap supercomputer using
an old PlayStation 3s (PS3s), and he’s also used his supercomputer made from an
old PlayStation 3s (PS3s) to publish numerous papers on black holes. His study centers
on detecting gravitational waves, which are bends in space-time that flow out
from a powerful astrophysical occurrence, for instance two black holes
colliding. They were first projected by Einstein’s famous theory of general
relativity, but no one has yet been able to detect them.

In order to work out further about these mysterious waves,
Khanna required a supercomputer-- a computer system that can crunch numbers no
less than 10 times better than an ordinary computer -- to model what take place
when two black holes collide, but unluckily supercomputers are getting more and
more expensive. So in 2009, Khanna decided to create his own instead, as he told Laura Parker from the New York Times. Khanna told Parker “Science has become
expensive. There’s simply not that much money going around, either at the
university or the federal level. Supercomputing allows scientists to make up
for the resources they don’t have.” In theory, a supercomputer essentially includes
connecting many ordinary computers together via a network. But as an
alternative of using ordinary laptops, Khanna decided to go for an inexpensive choice,
and connected PS3s. Their key advantage was that they permit users to install
their chosen operating system on the console, and they sell it for around
US$250.

To aid with his study, Sony gave four consoles to the experimentation,
and Khanna and the university bought additional 12. All 16 were then installed
with Linux and connected over the Internet - the outcome was a processor that
could accelerate calculations by a factor of nearly 10 compared to a normal
computer. He distributed the outcomes of the make-shift supercomputer in the paper
Parallel and Distributed Computing Systems in 2009.

According to Parker, Khanna used that supercomputer to model the behavior
of gravitational waves and circulate numerous papers on the phenomenon, but
since then he's now prepared an even more powerful model. In 2010, the US Air
Force Research Laboratory in New York learned about Khanna’s PS3 supercomputer,
and tried to construct their own out of 1,760 consoles, as visualized below, in
order to help with radar image observation.

US Department of Defense

As a thanks, the US Department of Defense gave 176 extra
PS3s to Khanna and his group. They now work with their supercomputer in a cooled
shipping container, which was meant to carry milk. This computer is as powerful
as 3,000 typical desktop computers, and only budget around US$75,000 to create
-- an incredibly inexpensive amount for a supercomputer. Though PS3s have their
limits -- the memory is much minor than customary supercomputers, for instance
-- their supercomputer is continuing to grow in power and has assisted not only
Khanna with his study, but many other researchers around the university. The group
will add additional 220 PS3s to the system by 2015.

The next task Khanna desires to work on is making a
supercomputer out of PC graphics cards, which are similarly low-cost but as
powerful as about 20 PS3 syatems.